Upcoming classic oldschool retro RPG

November 15th, 2012, 05:26

Originally Posted by Archibald
Prerendered… I did it in the past, it was horror, that's why I switched to 3D. But since 3D nowadays is too detailed and makes it feel modern I had to counter it somehow and thought of using these big pixels. These big pixels distact people enough to not make them notice too perfect lighting
With prerendered it easier to achieve the old school feel, but still this horror… Do you have a script in 3DSmax to prerender all these?

The game is progressing quite well. Playable demo should be available before Christmas.

I would like to talk about gameplay a bit, there are still some things I need to decide about.
The overall direction is simplicity, I would even say the mechanics being primitive. I want to avoid all heavy & complex mechanics if possible.

The premise is like this:
You have a party of 6 on a quest (you can't hire/change the party in the middle). You kill monsters for gold and experience. You don't level up automaticly, you need to go to a trainer and pay for it (where the payment would be non trivial, I want in some cases/stages of the game to force the player to delay level up of some charactes due to financial reasons). Level affects mostly HP and MP. You don't make any skills allocation or anything like that. There are attributes (pretty standard, around 8), you can increase these by finding crystals in various dungeons (the party member that touches it gets an appropriate attribute boost). There are also resistances (fire, cold, etc) I'm not sure where you get these. There is also an option to temporarily boost attributes and resistances by drinking from wells/fountains, effect of these wears off after midnight (Cindirella syndrome ). As for skills you buy these from various NPCs. Spells are trickier, most classes can have some spells (except barbarian, knight, etc), you don't get these upon level up, you need to get them somehow. The one source would be NPCs (quest rewards) and books in dungeons. But I'm not sure if this would be enough… wonder if I should make some shops/guilds in cities selling spells.
As for items and inventory system I'm not sure yet.

World:
There is one "world map" around 96x96 tiles I guess. From there you would be able to access 4-5 cities (services providers) and ~26 dungeons/castles/towers/tombs/caves (each 16x16 tiles). Around the world (main map) there would be reasonably many random goodies (a hut in the middle of a nowhere with an old sage living there, a mad wizard selling rare spells and many other things completely not connected to the main storyline). The key intention is to make the player "wow, I stumbled upon this hut in the center of a wasteland and I got this small reward and a talk, it was so surprising and unexpected and so much fun!" I plan to include a total of 80 monster types if I manage (at least 40 are guaranteed to be implemented). You should be able to visit almost anything in any order, as long as you manage to survive the encounter with the monsters. The storyline will be limiting your movement in a very minimalistic way (maybe a few locations that need a key or something, but that would be uncommon). Generally, you would be able to finish the game by visiting locations in many different orders (monsters will NOT be adjusted to your level, you can skip the early locations and then go back and wipe out these punny monsters in one blow, generally I am willing to sacriface a lot of combat balance for the freedom of movement).

LOL, when I posted screenshots everyone and his dog was commenting on the art style, when I posted about the core RPG system stuff no one commented at all

Come one, speak up, we are on RPGWatch forum, surely most of us here knows dozens RPG systems and can comment on this part.
Right now I'm finishing the typical technical stuff and need to move on to the RPG mechanics. I could use some ideas/tips/feedback now.

I plan beta release in December, it should be partially playable (a small part of the world map, one city and few dungeons, like 20 monsters, basic spells, level up, temple healing).

Originally Posted by empireforge
You are on a very fast development cycle! How do you find the time? For me, it takes weeks just to add a couple of interface screens…

Well, I have been doing games for 25 years, of which 15 first years I wasted without completing even one game If you waste 15 years working very hard without any effects you have two options, quit or learn how to make games much, much faster Fortunatelly, I went the latter route and got totally and absolutelly obsesed on the speed aspect of making games. Also, along the way I probably made all possible mistakes (so I'm kind of a master of knowing how to NOT make games ). In short, I'm so totally pathetic as a dev that if I simply do not make games the same way I usually do it is all right ,most of the time
As for finding the time, it's my full time job and this RPG project is the only one I'm developing at the moment. Besides, more time almost always hurts the project, being under pressure makes you make the game finished faster and better quality (because you won't have the time to implement any of the boring parts ). Quite contrary to logic but it works this way, at least for me.

Hey Archibald, I like your game - keep it up! :-)
When you got an alpha version or something, I would like to play it.

About the graphics, I have to agree with the others: Retro style and pixelish are both fine (for me), but please use somewhat higher resolution images. That will make things look a lot nicer.

About your gameplay: I find it really hard to discuss complex gameplay decisions in theory - without knowing your game really. If you can provide a demo or something, it would be easier for us/me to understand your game and give you some feedback.

Change the word exit to "close" and leave it where it is. The 3 x3 is hard to comment on without more details. ( I did not try to test game yet) It looks clean but why are there 2 of the lightening bolts on the screen that look the same? Just curious.

— Bart and Corwin should just admit that when it gets down to it, I will have the final say.